The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

is not the book my father would have written, though his words have been a constant guide in the writing of my own. If he were still with us, I would have perhaps gained further insight into the workings of his mind at that time and access to a few pertinent facts that still remain mysterious. At the same time, it would have been impossible to attain the degree of objectivity necessary to tell the story in its many facets. I embarked on my research with some trepidation, not knowing what I would find, and in the face of my siblings’ grave concerns about the enterprise. From their point of view (and that of many other friends), the less remembered – much less written – about this unfortunate incident, the better. But since returning to live in Boston, I was perhaps more aware than they how inaccurately it was recalled and how generally misunderstood it was in the first place. There was nothing that mattered more to my father than historical accuracy in fact and context, and there was nothing that bothered him more than uninformed and casually drawn conclusions.

      In my research into primary and secondary sources, I have sought to understand the circumstances surrounding the story of the Raphael with an open mind. While some mysteries remain, I have not knowingly left anything significant out of the story. I have sat with the enemy and absorbed the shock of learning that there were other ways of looking at the same events and the same personalities than the ones I was raised to believe. At the same time, I have carefully weighed each personal account for its degree of truth against accounts of the same events – both conflicting and corroborating – and endeavored to size up each witness for his or her inclinations and sympathies. Even in my father’s absence I have had to fight the natural reflex to defend him from criticism. For all my striving for objectivity, there is no escaping that I have come to this work with a point of view about the politics of the art world, and one that was clearly honed by the subject himself. But in reliving those years we lived together, as both biographer and witness, I have come to understand them as if for the first time. My point of view by now comes with a background of evidence, and now I understand in all its fullness what before I had simply taken on faith.

      

      Crowd in line for The Age of Rembrandt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 22–March 5, 1967.

      Crowds at The Age of Rembrandt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 22–March 5, 1967.

      The story of the Boston Raphael is inseparable from another story. No small part of this event was the political turmoil brewing within the institution itself in the late 1960s – a museum in the flux of change, in the throes of ideological conflict, as its size, its scale of operations, and the value of its collections reached a tipping point, the point at which the modern art museum was becoming the postmodern art museum. The philosophical questions of that bygone era are still urgently with us today, even as the landscape has vastly changed. The conventions of exporting works of art, the methods of research and authentication, the ways that museums are managed and the priorities that have recently overtaken them – all three of these issues turned a decisive corner during and in the immediate aftermath of the Raphael affair, just as they played out as elements in its outcome.

      “How well did you know him?” a former member of the MFA’s Ladies Committee asked me not long ago. The question took me aback. Did she mean that no one could know a father who was always on the job? Did she mean that she knew him better than I did? Had she forgotten for a moment whom she was talking to? Or was it a provocative question, the one I was constantly asking myself as I reviewed the archives of his life, seeking to understand him differently, objectively, while also knowing him, as a close witness to those troubled times, and as only a daughter can?

1965

      IN 1965 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was enjoying a revival that was long overdue. During the previous decade attendance figures had tripled; membership had multiplied six times; publications had grown from a trickle of drab little booklets into a steady flow of tempting full-color catalogs, calendars, and postcards; and fifty exhibition galleries had been completely renovated, their treasures brought to life in the glow of new lighting and fresh installations. Collaborating with the local educational station WGBH, the MFA was the first museum in America to be wired for television, hosting on-site programs for both adults and children several times a week, and thereby expanding its public outreach exponentially. Not least, the collections had grown by hundreds of artworks, bringing new strength to every department, including the promise earlier that year of the entire collection of eighteenth-century French art belonging to the late Forsyth Wickes. On the evening of December 10, 1965, the Museum’s volunteer Ladies Committee staged a surprise tenth anniversary party for the man who was responsible for instigating these dramatic developments: director Perry T. Rathbone.

      In an elaborate ruse in which his wife, Rettles, was a key conspirator, Rathbone arrived in his black tie and dinner jacket at the Huntington Avenue entrance, where he was greeted by a throng of two hundred friends. Amid a chorus of congratulations he was led up the grand staircase – red-carpeted for the occasion – to shake hands with beaming well-wishers every step of the way. He was genuinely flabbergasted. “I, the unsuspecting victim,” he wrote in his journal that week, “was led to the ‘slaughter’ by Rettles, who turned out to be the most subtle actress of them all in this colossal conspiracy.”¹ Rettles, shy and demure, was every bit the woman behind her man, following him up the stairs, smiling and embracing the guests, radiant in her newest Bonwit Teller evening dress.

      Perry and Rettles Rathbone greeting guests at party honoring PTR’s 10th anniversary as director, December 1965.

      At the top of the stairs Ralph Lowell, the MFA’s president of the board, crowned Rathbone with a laurel wreath. There followed general cocktail hubbub in the rotunda and then a dinner dance in the spacious Tapestry Hall just beyond. It was well known that the director had lately been taken by an insatiable love affair with Greece – both modern and ancient – and the theme was custom-made to his taste: a Greek menu of lamb, steeped in the Mediterranean flavors of lemon and garlic, washed down with the pinesap-flavored white wine retsina, and the cloudy, licorice-flavored aperitif ouzo, while a lively Greek band serenaded them all. Unprepared as he was to be the object of celebration that evening, Rathbone mustered his best modern Greek to express his thanks and amazement, which amused everyone, including the Greek musicians. Later, with typical spontaneity and joie de vivre, he led anyone willing in a Greek line dance. “The evening had a genius hard to define,” he fondly recalled, attributing it most of all to “the spirit, personality, the imagination of Frannie Hallowell.”²

      Frances Weeks Hallowell was the first woman to join the MFA board of trustees. From the start, Frannie and Perry were natural allies. At a welcoming dinner for the new director ten years earlier, they were seated next to each other, and Perry could see immediately that this bright, attractive, and socially connected woman could be a major asset to the cause, and not just as a trustee. To that old boy network she brought her feminine talent for social entertaining as well as the tactical mind of a politician. In another age she might well have been running for public office. Her father, Sinclair Weeks, was onetime Republican senator for Massachusetts and secretary of commerce under President Eisenhower in the 1950s. As his eldest child, Frannie learned firsthand from his example and inherited his political acumen, as well as his ambition. It came naturally to her to be a step ahead of the game, and her mind teemed with ideas. Over dinner on the evening when they first met, Perry asked Frannie if she would be willing to organize a group of women volunteers for the MFA. “Will I?” she replied with a big smile. “I can’t wait!”³ Unbeknownst to Perry, Frannie had conjured up the notion of a women’s committee of volunteers almost as soon as she was elected to the board just a few months before. With Rathbone in charge, her idea took flight.

      The tenth anniversary party was typical of Hallowell’s genius, and Rathbone was right in awarding her the lion’s share of credit in the creation of that magical evening. But perhaps